March 28, 2010 -- New York Times (NY)

Book Review: The Land of Lock and Key

By Daniel Bergner

Prisons are sacred places. There our society claims control
over the lives of men and women; there we assume the roles of
gods. And whether the prison sprawls over thousands of acres
like the penitentiary farms of the Deep South, or compresses
its convicts on tight tiers, the air within holds a particular
density, a palpable weight created not only by the crimes the
inmates have committed but also by the ownership we have taken
of the convicts, whether we acknowledge it or not.

In "Texas Tough," Robert Perkinson, a professor
of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, delivers
an important reckoning with this societal responsibility. Though
his loud, machismo-laden title might better serve for a reality
show about life behind bars, Perkinson offers a searching history
of American incarceration, tracing the failures of our prisons
to the approach that Texas and other Southern states have long
taken toward their criminals and denouncing the fact that, with
about 1.6 million people in our penitentiaries and an additional
800,000 in our jails, the United States locks up its citizens
at a higher rate than any other country in the world.

Race and slavery lie at the heart of Perkinson's vision of
American penology, and a profound dismay infuses the rhetoric
of his opening pages. "Freedom is the United States' founding
creed," he declaims in the book's first sentence, and immediately
he adds pronouncements from Thomas Paine, Andrew Jackson and
Barack Obama making the same point. The oncoming irony is unmissable;
there isn't much that is subtle about Perkinson's writing, and
perhaps there shouldn't be. Not only do we incarcerate at some
six times the rate that Britain does, to take one example, or
around seven times the rate of Canada, but, Perkinson relates,
African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as
whites, and "African-American men today go to prison at
twice the rate they go to college."

As Perkinson sets out to tell the story of America's movement
from, in his words, "the age of slavery to the age of incarceration,"
with the latter period beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing
to the present day, he concentrates on Texas in part because
the modern surge of its inmate population has far outstripped
even the spike in national numbers. Between 1965 and 2000, the
number of prisoners in the country rose by 600 percent; in Texas,
the growth was twice that. The state ranks near the very top
for the percentage of its people kept behind bars. And for well
over a century, Texas has held to a perspective on penology --
an outlook devoid even of the goal, let alone the reality, of
rehabilitation -- that now dominates the nation. The state, in
Perkinson's eyes, has provided a "template for a more fearful
and vengeful society," for a country that no longer aims,
with its inmates, "to repair and redeem but to warehouse,
avenge and permanently differentiate convicted criminals from
law-abiding citizens."

The template was mostly formed, according to "Texas
Tough," by slavery and its aftermath. Defeated in the
Civil War, Texas and its Southern confederates were desperate
to retain as much dominion as possible over their former slaves,
and they found a way through law enforcement. Blacks seized for
low-level crimes faced severe punishment with little chance of
defending themselves in court. Perkinson tells of a black man
sentenced to two years for stealing a pair of shoes and another
sent away for five for snatching a bushel of corn. In the three
years following the war, Texas' inmate population nearly quadrupled
-- and darkened considerably in skin color, with former slaves
soon outnumbering whites. Over the next few decades, these new
black prisoners were rented out to an array of private businesses
under a system known as convict leasing, which replicated slavery
for its brutality and may well have exceeded it in disregard
for human life.

Black prisoners in Texas cut sugar cane and picked cotton
on the plantations of the state's agricultural barons. They built
the railroads that took the cotton to market. White convicts
were leased out as well, but often for less arduous labor. Whipped
and driven to work despite malaria and dysentery, or shot trying
to escape, blacks fell dead nearly twice as frequently as whites.
And the death tolls were high. At one work camp, where the men
chopped timber for railway ties, almost a quarter of the convicts
perished in a period of four months.

Similar toil and treatment prevailed in much of the South,
and even when convict leasing came to an end in the early 20th
century -- in Texas, the end arrived partly through a campaign
waged by an outraged prison pastor and a crusading San Antonio
journalist -- the system was replaced by government-run plantations
and chain gangs. Fatalities declined, but subjugation remained
the ethos. And this Southern penological tradition, the book
argues, stands in important contrast to the Northern one, which
was shaped by idealists whose early-19th-century penitentiaries
were designed to restore "the vicious part of mankind to
virtue and happiness," in the language of Benjamin Rush,
a Pennsylvania doctor and signer of the Declaration of Independence
who helped create the Northern model. This method, which stressed
solitary confinement and silence, may have been a harsh failure
at redeeming convicts, but at least it had reformation in mind.

It is the Southern tradition that has proved, in Perkinson's
telling, to have the lasting nationwide legacy, both in the current
warehousing of inmates and in the racism now powerfully embedded
in American penology. Much as emancipation brought on a penal
backlash against Southern blacks, so did the civil rights movement
-- except that this later reaction was national. Equal protection,
desegregation and President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty
were quickly followed by tougher drug laws and crackdowns on
crime that, with conscious intention or not, made blacks a target.
Since the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the disparity
between black and white incarceration rates has almost doubled.
In the early 21st century, the country, Perkinson suggests, has
in a sense become the late-19th-century South.

This is an alarming indictment, built on passionate and exhaustive
research. Unfortunately, Perkinson presents his case in a sometimes
numbing fashion. He details Texas' prison history decade by decade,
failing to fully dramatize the characters who could bring life
to his urgent writing. Problematically, too, his case seems,
in certain ways, overly broad, and in other ways evasive. The
abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo may not be as easily
attributed to the legacy of slavery and Southern penology as
Perkinson abruptly and sweepingly asserts in his final pages.
And along with his condemnations of Texas and America, Perkinson
would have done a service by thoroughly examining, rather than
nearly ignoring, recent evidence that both the state and the
country are holding incarceration rates in check partly by embracing,
however gingerly, the spirit of rehabilitation. A new report
from the Pew Center on the States, about the country's correctional
systems, highlights Texas' nascent commitment to drug treatment
behind bars. Perkinson might have offered a glimpse of such programs
and a sense of whether they will last.

By documenting relentlessly, almost without counterpoint,
the inhuman ity that has defined Texan and Ameri can incarceration,
"Texas Tough" leaves us wondering, despairingly,
whether there is any way our society can rise to the godlike
responsibility that suffuses prison air, whether there is any
way we can rehabilitate our prisons so that we can reliably reform
the convicts we lock inside.

Daniel Bergner is the author of "God of the Rodeo:
The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison" and
"The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms
of Lust and Longing," which has just been published in paperback.

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